This invention relates generally to retrieval of information in an information handling network. More particularly, it relates to techniques for recording and presenting one or more sessions of a search session in a distributed environment such as Web browsing in the Internet. Further, it relates to techniques for using the user interface of the present invention for navigating through a distributed data set such as the Internet.
It is well known to couple a plurality of computer systems into a network of computer systems. In this way, the collective resources available within the network may be shared among users, thus allowing each connected user to enjoy resources which would not be economically feasible to provide to each user individually. With the growth of the Internet, sharing of computer resources has been brought to a much wider audience; it has become a cultural medium in today's society for both information and entertainment. Government agencies employ Internet sites for a variety of informational purposes. For many companies, their Internet sites are an integral part of their business; they are frequently mentioned in the companies' television, radio and print advertising.
The World Wide Web, or simply "the web", is the Internet's multimedia information retrieval system. It is the most commonly used method of transferring data in the Internet environment. Other methods exist such as the File Transfer Protocol (FTP) and Gopher, but have not achieved the popularity of the Web. Client machines accomplish transactions to Web servers using the Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP), which is a known application protocol providing users access to files, e.g., text, graphics, images, sound, video, using a standard page description language known as the Hypertext Markup Language (HTML). HTML provides basic document formatting and allows the developer to specify "links" to other servers and files. In the Internet paradigm, a network path to a server is identified by a Uniform Resource Locator (URL) having a special syntax for defining a network connection.
Retrieval of information is generally achieved by the use of an HTML-compatible "browser", e.g., Netscape Navigator, at a client machine. When the user of the browser specifies a link via a URL, the client issues a request to a naming service to map a hostname in the URL to a particular network IP address at which the server is located. The naming service returns a list of one or more IP addresses that can respond to the request. Using one of the IP addresses, the browser establishes a connection to a server. If the server is available, it returns a document or other object. If the server is not available or overloaded, however, the user may receive an error message, e.g., "server not responding" or the like.
After some amount of browsing in the Web, a user can become quite confused as to where he has been and how to return to a site which he has previously browsed. The present browser interface does not show a history of the Web sites visited by a user during a current or past web browsing session in an easily understood manner. At most, prior art web browsers have a list of URLs which the user has browsed in the current session in a chronological order. This is deficient for at least two reasons. The URLs are often in a very arcane format, particularly for the inexperienced user. The URLs themselves are poorly understood and not sufficiently associated in the minds of the users to enable them to use the URLs to return to a desired page. This is particularly true where the URL was reached by hyperlink, i.e. the user never typed the URL.
The chronological listing of the URLs does little to show the relationship between the web pages. Nor does it show the user whether the navigation between pages was accomplished by a bookmark, typing in the URL or due to a hyperlink in the previous page. The mode of navigation would be a helpful clue as to the identity of a page.
This invention provides an improved user interface for presenting and navigating through a history of web browsing.